


Lean On Me

by egrets20



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Bittersweet, Blood, Chronic Illness, Disease, Gen, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Hurt/Comfort, Very triggering, Vomiting, Weight Issues, anon account, helpful and supportive doctor, neglectful sylvia, suicide ideation, untreated chronic illness, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 09:41:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23469322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/egrets20/pseuds/egrets20
Summary: The Doctor notices that Donna is acting haunted and anxious. The Doctor suggests sorting through her memories together.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16





	Lean On Me

**Author's Note:**

> You know when you experience something so awful you have to write about it a few times to get it out? This is one of those pieces. Heed the tags.

“You’re up early,” the Doctor commented.

Donna gave a start. She had been in the middle of wiping off the kitchen counter. She looked up to see the Doctor leaning casually against the door frame.

“Someone has to make sure this place doesn’t become shabby.” She carried on disinfecting.

The Doctor gave a loud inhale. “The Tardis does a lot of her own sterilization. You don’t need to do that.”

Donna just shrugged, continuing on with her cleaning spree. The Doctor seemed to let the subject drop and began making tea. They fell into an easy kind of silence, at least on the Doctor’s part. Donna felt herself go slightly on edge due to his presence. She was unsure as to why.

She heard the Doctor sit down at the table. There was an extra clink of china and Donna found her suspicions being confirmed when she glanced over to find him steeping a second cup.

“Fancy a cuppa? Don’t want that to get cold.”

Oh, she knew this routine. She had done this to the Doctor enough times in a variety of predictable ways. “Thanks, but I’m fine.”

The Doctor blew noisily over the top of his cup. Donna sighed. She set aside her cleaning supplies and joined him. She was rewarded by a bright smile and a steeping cup pushed her way.

“So, couldn’t sleep?”

Trust him to get to the crux of things.

“No, well, just couldn’t get back to sleep,” she said softly. She cupped her hands around the squat mug.

“Nightmares?” He asked evenly.

“No, I’m alright. Just a touch of insomnia.”

The Doctor hummed, looking down at his tea. They went quiet again. The Tardis let out a harsh beep somewhere down the corridor. Donna jumped.

“That right there, that’s what I’m asking about,” the Doctor told her.

“What? The Tardis?”

“No, you with your cleaning and how you’ve been ever since the hospital,” he told her frankly. (Their latest adventure had led them to an intensive care facility to see one of the patients.)

“I can stop cleaning...”

The Doctor sighed and leaned back in his chair. He looked strangely agitated. “You would tell me if something wasn’t alright? I don’t want to lose you, Donna. If you’ve been wanting to go back home...”

It looked as if it pained him to say it. She was already shaking her head, even as her heart fluttered, agreeing with his words. She had wanted to go back home...for just a little while. She knew that he could see it in her eyes. His calm demeanor cracked.

“Is there anything I can do?” He slid their beverages aside so that he could hold her hand. He rubbed the sides of her palm with his thumbs.

Donna gave a small tremulous smile, watching his hands work over hers. “I’ll be alright. Just give me a couple of days and I’ll cheer up.”

If she didn’t, then there was nothing they could do except spend time apart.

“Donna,” he growled. He seldom used that tone with her, especially when she wasn’t already shouting at him.

“I’m just- I’m just too caught up in the past right now. It’s stupid really.”

“From when you were ill?” His eyes had turned keen and sharp.

Donna blinked and took a steadying breath. “Yeah. Don’t mind me, though. I’ll get over it.”

She knew that she had been a veritable anxious wreck lately, and that the Doctor had picked up on it. She was supposed to the one holding him emotionally aloft, not the other way around.

“There’s a procedure I can do when someone’s gone through something traumatic. I can share your memories, give you some perspective on them.”

Donna thought about that for a moment. She had never really properly told anyone before, but her Mum knew most of it. That knowledge did nothing to make it easier though. She shook her head.

“I think it would help.” He stared at her entreatingly.

On one hand, she wouldn’t wish for anyone to ever experience what she had gone through, but on the other, it was the Doctor asking. He had seen civilizations rise and fall, had witnessed the greatest joys and suffering the universe had to offer. Her problems must seem tiny in comparison.

“If I agree to it, you won’t be allowed to laugh at me, and you’ll keep what you see to yourself.”

The Doctor nodded enthusiastically. He gave her a cautious smile and stood. He offered her his hand.

“What, right now?”Donna said incredulously.

“Did you want to wait?” He looked like the possibility hadn’t crossed his mind.

“I-yeah. Sure, we can do it now,” she agreed.

She let him help her up, but attempted to take the lead once they exited the kitchen. She started walking in the direction of the control room before he halted her with a tap on her arm.

“We should go to the library. We’ll be comfortable there.”

The library and swimming pool combo did hold a certain appeal, especially to her. She backtracked down the corridor. There was a certain kind of tension in the air as they entered the library together and chose a spot to sit. The Doctor kicked his shoes off so that he could sit cross-legged. Donna sat down more stiffly. The deep blue sofa sank under their combined weight. The Doctor’s hand hovered over her arm, as if hesitant to touch.

“I won’t see anything you don’t want me to see. You’ll only show me the memories that you want my help with,” he assured her.

It sounded straightforward enough. She knew that it was unlikely to be that simple though, especially with her tumultuous emotions.

“I won’t hurt you, mentally or anything, if I get upset?” She asked.

He shook his head, mouth a firm line.

“Okay, let’s get this over with.”

The Doctor’s gaze almost seemed to hold relief before his brow furrowed. He held his fingertips up to her temple.

“Lean forward,” he said gently. That was all the warning she got before she was flung deeply into her own mind.

* * *

Donna felt like she was stirring awake. She wasn’t waking alone, wherever she was. She could feel a sort of vibration on the edge of her consciousness. It seemed like her friend.

When she opened her eyes, she was sitting in an auditorium style room and she was surrounded by students. “It’s alright,” the shadow of the Doctor assured her. “We’re in a school related memory of yours. How old are you, anyway?”

Donna thought, watching her old acquaintances take their seats beside her.

“About nineteen, maybe twenty,” she told him. “I didn’t mean to take you back this far.”

They went quiet as the instructor started speaking. From what they could glean, Donna and her classmates were about to be sent out for job training. They were warned that it was going to be difficult and exhausting during test time. The instructor made a wry remark that some of them looked exhausted right now. She was staring directly at Donna as she spoke.

Donna felt a little hum of amusement from the Doctor’s side of her consciousness.

Time shifted and Donna had her head nestled against her arms in the same room. Her old chums were telling her she didn’t look good, and they were asking what they could do for her.

“Nothing, not unless you can give me a blood transfusion,” young Donna said.

She felt the Doctor’s interest stir.

Then Donna time jumped again, and she was on her knees in the lavatory, losing her breakfast and feeling a strangely deep-rooted despair. Fear colored that memory and it jarred her slightly. She felt the Doctor take attentive notice of that emotion and tug inquiringly at it. It was not unlike the Tardis picking through some of her more volatile emotions. He was asking her why she was scared.

Visions erupted before her eyes of blood splattered tiles by her bare feet and legs. Her clothes came off to reveal protruding ribs. She looked into a mirror in a lavatory and she felt the Doctor actually recoil from shock.

Donna’s skin was discolored and she had huge shadows under her eyes. Her face and features were tiny, starved. The Doctor’s consciousness wrapped around hers in a mental embrace. She reminded him that they weren’t done, probably hadn’t even scratched the surface. He settled back patiently.

In truth, it surprised her that the Doctor had become so concerned early on. She hoped he wouldn’t become agitated, though she knew that this only got worse.

They dropped unexpectedly into the Noble household. Donna was typing an e-mail to someone. She squirmed in her seat, head dropping down as her body writhed. Her abdomen burned in a sort of phantom-pain. She lay herself on the floor and stifled any sounds she made. On her desk, her e-mail had stated that she was having trouble focusing in class and couldn’t keep water down.

She heard the Doctor ask her why she wasn’t in a hospital. Donna felt bitter amusement at the question and decided to show him.

“Why did you go there?” Sylvia shouted at her daughter, removing some plates from the kitchen drying rack.

Donna proceeded to calmly tell her that she was still bleeding and that the nurses found that she had had a fever.

Sylvia railroaded right over that information and continued berating her for going to a Doctor behind her back. The resulting argument set everyone’s teeth on edge, but her Spaceman seemed pleased that she had gone and gotten herself some help.

Sylvia had tried to cure Donna herself by various snake-oil type remedies. She made Donna drink vinegar and flax seed oil. She even tried something so experimentally ridiculous and grotesque that it made the Doctor gag.

“Alright?” Donna asked her friend.

The Doctor ignored her question and urged her to keep up her narrative. She was laying in bed now. So, they were to the bed-ridden months already. She looked at the clock and got up to use the lavatory. An hour later, she did the same thing. She flashed over a brief memory of dry-heaving. Donna’s hands held her stomach.

“Your stomach’s distended,” the Doctor noted with a chilly voice.

Oh, she knew that tone. Deep down, the oncoming storm was not a happy camper. What followed was a vision that did nothing to quell him.

Donna’s rich red hair was dull and lay scattered in clumps on the washroom floor. She stooped down to pick them up and throw them away. Many clumps remained, but she was too tired to dispose of them and her blood that was staining the ground near her feet again.

“Where’s your father? Where’s Wilf?” the Doctor asked her.

“Dad’s gone. Gramps hasn’t moved in yet.”

She was crawling to her dresser, preparing to clothe herself for the day and then go back to bed. She crawled to and fro the entire way. So, she wasn’t walking either.

They cut to a good day. Wilf had finally moved in and had fought with Sylvia to let him take her to a Doctor again. Donna got into the car carefully, crying out when the movement jostled her fragile bones. She was able to walk for a little while, and she watched herself take medication and become better for a stint.

Wilf got the flu and Donna had to contend with her mother on her own as she lay by the little space-heater out in the dining room. She was so cold and so tired. Sleeping more than one hour at a time was difficult with the pain keeping her awake. Donna lay wrapped in blankets, as close to the heat as she could get. She ended up sleeping for a week then, she remembered, only waking up enough to eat a little and use the lavatory.

The Doctor had gone very quiet in her mind. Donna didn’t pause though as she showed him how her hope and personality dwindled down to pain and survival. She took pills from the medical professionals that gave her such a severe reaction that they were classified as an allergy for her. She kept them around though, just in case the pain became too much.

Donna felt another conscious awareness slip into her mind. The Tardis announced her presence with a chirp and nestled in beside the Doctor. The ghost of her warmth slipped over them as Donna continued.

Donna tossed and turned, skin burning as a myriad of confusing images flashed by. She was unable to go out and buy herself medicine. She only writhed and waited for the high fever to burn out.

They all watched from her perspective as she grew thinner and she lay in bed more while the ceiling spun in dizzying side-to-side motions above them. Donna slept the days away. A night time visitor startled them all. Her door slid silently open and the visitor took a seat at her side.

“Oh no, not you again,” sick Donna groused at the sad looking man in a tux.

“Ignore him,” mental Donna told the Doctor and the Tardis. “He’s just an apparition to my fevered mind. I thought he was someone I knew, but it was just my brain trying to look after me.”

She felt the Tardis nudge her comfortingly. The hallucination ended up fading away with the encroaching dawn. Donna got worse. On one night in particular, she realized that she might fall asleep and not wake up. Unable to get to a hospital or even a phone, she had shut her eyes and accepted the knowledge that there was nothing she could do except sleep. To her later relief, she did wake up.

The remaining shared visions held the verbal pain she went through. Her work places told her that she was spineless and didn’t take initiative as she was falling ill. Her very best friend pulled her aside one day and told her to get her driving license and get her act together. She did these things between bouts of illness, tear stained and with dwindling hope in the world and existence.

Then, she jumped far ahead to her surgeries. The surgeon had to break up her procedure into two visits to help ensure her survival. The nurses exclaimed as she recovered that they thought she looked much better and they had feared that she “wasn’t going to make it.”

Donna cheated death and the Doctor and the Tardis watched as she began to live. She drove around town and did normal human things, like picking up the groceries and going job hunting. After a couple of months of this, she ended up meeting Lance. And on her wedding day, she appeared aboard the Tardis and demanded to be returned to the wedding venue.

The Doctor slipped out of her mind then. The Tardis wrapped her up in one last mental embrace before retreating too. Donna became aware of arms holding her and a hand brushing her hair back. She was still dazed.

“Was that everything?” The Doctor asked

When Donna shook her head, she felt the grip around her grow tighter.

“Oh, Donna Donna Donna,” he murmured.

She had skipped past the bizarre wounds and sores, the feelings of failure and being burdensome, and how being picked up and carried had hurt so much. Not to mention the challenges of getting out of a bath tub and the mentions of cancer. But, she had said enough. There had been so much over those years. Trying to remember everything that had hurt was like trying to remember the different toys in a toybin. Just when you thought you were finished, you ran into a jack-in-the-box, and it reminds you all over again.

Donna sighed, feeling a little of her constant anxiety ease. Maybe she was silly for taking all of that so hard. Yes, it had lasted for years, but it was a couple of years ago now. She was warm and safe and fed. She had access to medical attention whenever she wanted it.

True, she knew that near-death experiences tended to haunt people. She hadn’t even needed therapy, though. But the way the Doctor was clutching her made her feel a little like she had shown him something horrible. She petted his hair.

“I’m alright,” she assured him.

The Doctor shook his head sadly. Donna knew that she didn’t hurt as much as he did, but she still hurt.

“Well...” Donna considered. “I’ll be alright someday.”

The End.


End file.
